Poem For The Horse Phedras De Blondel

It’s actually more common than you think, they said of Florida, the underground, the passingof shoulders between hands, that lean muscle cleaved from scapula, fresh in its red,and when Stephens had found him there, the head in tact, we turned our eyes to such massacre.

Who calmed him before the knife bore inward?

Or, was there a calming— the turning down of velvet toward grass. This was a professional.

In the Atlantic, certain species of mollusk are known to store their feeding, their taking of poisons from the bodies of hydra and projecting outward their sting—the absorption of power surfacing through skin, as if the self had always builtits weaponry fromthe trampling of others.

Did the butchers feel within Phedras that taut trigger, that scorching of tensed thigh as it buckled under the weight of legend, the chestnut iris wavering, the men thinking that as they scored his sides they too might become something of an embodied force, shifting in their mortality.

Slaughter, in all of its detail, is never finite.

In the field, what creature’s ears listened as they parted bone, sparing the neck, the torso vacant. Whose eyes saw as the golden threads dispelled